iCharts vs. Longview Analytics (arcplan)

The iCharts has suited our organization work as it has helped us a lot in our internal and external works. As we use iCharts for the internal team in representing the working reports and data of the business in an accurate manner. It helps in representing the presentation to the client to showcase our work and present him the data and work flow through the iCharts. As I don't found anything missing in this software.

It is very suitable for complete corporate BI solutions. If you see BI as embedding information into your organization and business processes, and thus as more than just a few scattered dashboards and reports, arcplan is your platform. It's less suitable for ad-hoc reporting and data discovery. It can do it (everything is possible), but there is strong competition in this area.

• Their new platform is easy to navigate
• We had a dedicated support person to help set up searches and train in the use of iCharts
• Separate Dashboards for each group

Incentivized

• Excellent dashboard.
• Well advanced BI metrics.
• Better interfacing to other DW.

Incentivized

• The new platform has limitations on colors and sizing
• iCharts seem to have closed its doors without notification and now we have a product with no support

Incentivized

• Positioning and marketing. Most BI vendors use a non-technical sales strategy and focus on shiny, sexy dashboards to sell the story. In order to position arcplan fairly and correctly, the technical and business advantages need to be part of a sales story. So, it is not really an easy product to sell to customers, if it has to compete with now-to-wow-five-minute products.
• Learning/training for developers. It's easy to learn the basics of arcplan, because the interface is logical. But nothing prevents a beginning developer from creating a monstrous application, because there is no prescribed architecture. It really takes some experience to become a good arcplan architect. It's a disadvantage resulting from one of arcplan's biggest advantages.
• Data connectors: arcplan standard comes with a connector of your choice. Additional connectors need to be purchased separately. Many other products come with a full range of connectors.

I haven't experience any other alternative product of this.

Personally, I prefer QlikView not because it's more stable but simply just for the looks of the dashboard. One of my clients in Sydney recently moved from arcplan to QlikView. The reason was mainly looks and that QlikView has more training materials for the support users to train with. So in all, it does not really stack well against QlikView.

Incentivized